A Few Arguments For and Against the Democrats Who Donated $13,000 to Rebuild the Firebombed GOP Headquarters
Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty
If you missed the news, someone tossed a Molotov Cocktail-like projectile into a Republican headquarters building in Hillsborough, NC on Saturday night, and spray-painted a swastika-laced warning on the side an adjacent building: “Nazi Republicans leave town or else.” You do not need to be told, I hope, that this was a strange and horrific act, even if nobody was injured.
Spray painted on the side of the OCGOP when it was fire bombed “Nazi Republicans leave town or else” pic.twitter.com/gvduwIpjMw
— NCGOP (@NCGOP) October 16, 2016
Police are investigating, but the culprit is still unclear at this point…which didn’t stop licensed Twitter troll Donald J. Trump from weighing in, armed with his usual restraint:
Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office in Orange County because we are winning @NCGOP
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016
Next, a Democrat who works at Harvard started a GoFundMe page, inspired by tweets like this one, in order to “enable the Orange County, NC Republican office to re-open as soon as possible.”
It worked, and it worked quickly—in 18 hours, 550 people, most of them presumably Democrats, raised over $13,000 before they shut the thing down.
Here now, for your consideration, are a few arguments for and against that fundraising effort.
Against
1. As The South Lawn laid out earlier this morning, the record of the North Carolina Republican party over the past few years has been just slightly offensive to anyone with a shred of human decency. Among other things—and there are lots of other things—they have made it harder for women to get an abortion, repealed the Racial Justice Act which allowed death row inmates to appeal convictions influenced by race, arrested peaceful protesters, slashed funding at colleges, made it harder to enforce child labor laws, froze the low minimum wage even in cities like Charlotte, passed voting laws explicitly designed to limit black and Hispanic representation that had to be struck down by a Federal Appeals Court, and went on the attack against the entire LGBT community with the national embarrassment known as HB2. If you want evidence of the banality of evil, consider how boring and predictable that paragraph was to write, and read—the state Republican party has bigoted politics in its blood, and discrimination is written between the lines of the party charter. Hatred is practically mundane for them, at this point, and you’re a dupe if you ever expect that to change.